The debate in the Berlin House of Representatives in mid-January about the intentionally caused power outage repeatedly led to the iconic image of an almost centenarian who was billeted in a gymnasium. Subtext: This is how politically responsible people treat old and weak people! In the midst of this discourse about social coldness towards those in need of care, “It could also be nice” appears, a volume of poetry by the Leipzig writer Martina Hefter, which credits itself with presenting “speaking texts”.
A misunderstanding could arise with the addition to the title: Hefter’s “spoken texts” do not breathe the tradition of phonetic poetry from Franz Mon to Michael Lentz; rather, one finds connections to Black Mountain College around Charles Olson, where verse lengths were already associated with individual dispositions such as the respective breathing performance. Who needs it. Poetry, however, always aims at execution (reading/performance), regardless of whether it is high-sounding or aimed at everyday language; Exception: visual poetry.
A unique selling point would be Hefter’s physical actions while speaking the poem. But this isn’t new either; it has been performed on all sorts of off-stages since the 2000s. The Siegen poet and is representative of this multiverse Museum dancer Crauss called.
The book
Martina Stapler: “It could also be beautiful. Poems/spoken texts”. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 2026, 122 pages, 22 euros
Formally, “It could also be beautiful” offers a vital bricolage; In terms of content, it is a virtuously composed rhapsody that cannot easily be found twice in contemporary poetry. For some, Hefter’s private demonology, including her “Sketch of the Devils,” is already part of it House treasure of German poems: “The fourth devil is considered to be a representative of/ music and dance. He holds/ in his left hand/ a long, thin whip, with fool’s gold (…) wakes up (…) those who have gone to bed too early by rapidly letting the/ whip rattle through a fold on the side of his body/, which produces a sizzling whistling sound/.”
Prelude to the successful run
This demonstrates how little formal innovation is ultimately needed to evaluate literature Boom in autofictional literatureas its protagonist Martina Hefter most recently was awarded the German Book Prize. This work, the first edition of which was published in 2018, is the prelude to this successful run, just in a less marketable segment than prose.
It is of little use to complain that the use of reality effects – brand names, local color, etc. – as well as the staging of orality are merely repeats of the everyday poetry of the seventies, the new subjectivity of the eighties, and the social beat of the nineties. Otherwise one would fall for this exemplary stylistic game with a very humorless attitude, which never loses sight of the serious request: “I, Martina Hefter, will do the devil and put sentences into my mother’s mouth that she would never say, I mean, poetic sentences (…) that summarize what it could be like if you lie there/always like that and depend on whether another person has the grace to call for a carer/me It’s slowly dawning on you that you’re supposed to experience it all in a real-life way.”
The tormenting self-observation of this writing finds its succinct summation in an epigram entitled “Essay”: “And that is again formulated in an attitude/ that belongs to my subject of attitudes”. The versified moral text about the conflict between a daughter-in-law who has to take on care work (“unfair in its own way/when I have to do it all alone”) and her demented mother-in-law, who is stylized as “mother-in-law”, reminds us that poetry can be something completely different than operationalized nature show.
Martina Hefter’s manic changing tone and rhetorical register are and remain impressive. Even though there is comparably urgent lyricism from Nora Bossong to Slata Roschal, a mix of private criticism with social criticism, Hefter remains unparalleled in his drastic, empathetic approach: “Who actually pays for all of this for me/ I’m serious, it’s not meant to be cynical/ I’m doing a service to society here/ I visit an old person three times a week/ so that this person isn’t alone/ with the devils.”
Missed opportunity
A new edition of this volume of poetry, published almost identically eight years ago by the renowned Berlin label Kookbooks, would be unproblematic if one did not have to view the present edition as a deterioration: the font size fragments the typeface, destroys metrical connections, and hinders the flow of reading. In Klett-Cotta’s reissue, the artfully tattered long poem of the title seems degraded to the level of a score. The opportunity to link individual video sequences of the dance-recitation performance, to which subtexts refer in a sometimes comical severity and sometimes in a brooding manner, into the book was missed. The reissue lacks meaning.
A philological classification, instead of “one of several possible afterwords” (by the author), would certainly have made accessibility much easier: after all, one of the basic concerns of the work is to prepare people for the existential impact of a family care case.
In this edition, “It could also be beautiful” becomes, willy-nilly, a sad lesson about reputation that has turned grotesque within a supreme discipline that will soon be completely irrelevant. If respected commercial publishers in the poetry segment only rely on prominent names in umpteenth editions and increasingly forgo conveying fresh poetic concepts, poetic linguistic art will atrophy into a déjà vu of the very latest spoken look; Poetry itself becomes a need for care.